I picked Origin almost casually while on holiday, knowing practically nothing about it. What I got was a film about grief, race, caste and the uncomfortable machinery human beings have repeatedly invented to decide who belongs above whom.
Spoilers throughout.
Probably Not the Light Holiday Film I Had in Mind
There is something slightly dangerous about choosing a film completely blind. No trailer, no reviews, no vague recollection of a publicity campaign telling me what sort of emotional posture I should assume before pressing play. Origin was one of those choices. I was on holiday, looking for something to watch, saw Ava DuVernay’s 2023 film and went in knowing little beyond the title and a few members of the cast. That was probably the best way I could have encountered it.
It also meant I was completely unprepared for how much the thing would weigh on me. Origin begins with Trayvon Martin, which gives you a fairly immediate indication that this is not going to be background viewing while checking where to have breakfast tomorrow. From there, it expands steadily outward, moving through American slavery and segregation, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, and the Indian caste system. It sounds unwieldy written down like that, perhaps even foolhardy. Yet DuVernay is not really making a conventional historical drama about three enormous subjects. She is dramatising one woman trying to work out whether there is an underlying structure connecting them.
That woman is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, and the film is inspired by Wilkerson’s 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Rather than simply adapting the argument of the book, DuVernay decided to make Wilkerson herself the protagonist and reconstruct the emotional and intellectual journey involved in writing it. According to the film’s production notes, DuVernay interviewed Wilkerson more than a dozen times over roughly 15 months, eventually approaching the film as both an exploration of ideas and a story about a writer pursuing those ideas while enduring profound personal loss.
That decision is probably the reason Origin works as well as it does. An illustrated lecture about social hierarchy could have been admirable and utterly exhausting. A story about somebody trying to understand the world because her own world keeps falling apart is something else.
Grief Gives the Theory a Body
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor carries an extraordinary amount of material here. Isabel has to function simultaneously as journalist, researcher, wife, daughter, cousin, sceptic, observer and increasingly reluctant vessel for the film’s enormous historical argument. That could easily have produced a performance made almost entirely of concerned staring and notebook writing. Instead, Ellis-Taylor makes the thinking itself feel active.
Her Isabel is continually listening. She watches people, tests language, turns an idea around and occasionally recoils from where that idea leads. There is intelligence in the performance without the character having to announce how intelligent she is every five minutes, which is rarer in films about writers than it really ought to be.
Then there is Brett Hamilton, Isabel’s husband, played by Jon Bernthal. Bernthal has built enough of his screen persona around physical volatility that seeing him inhabit somebody this gentle feels almost disarming. Brett does not exist simply to be the supportive husband standing somewhere behind the important person. The relationship has warmth, silliness and the mundane familiarity of two people whose lives have become intertwined through repetition rather than cinematic declaration.
That matters because the film takes him away. Brett’s death changes the temperature of everything that follows. Isabel is already wrestling with histories built around separation, classification and dehumanisation, and suddenly she is dealing with the most intimate form of separation imaginable. Her mother Ruby and her cousin Marion are also slipping away from her, so research becomes entangled with bereavement. She continues travelling, interviewing and writing because life does not politely postpone intellectual work until grief has finished with you.
Ellis-Taylor and Bernthal were the performances that stayed with me most. There is no grand attempt to make Brett into a saint so his death will hurt more. He simply feels loved, and that turns out to be enough.
The Dangerous Business of Comparing Human Cruelty
Wilkerson’s central argument is that racism can be understood not merely as individual prejudice or even as a collection of discriminatory laws, but as one expression of a deeper caste structure: a system that assigns human value, status and possibility according to inherited categories.
The film therefore places American racial hierarchy alongside Nazi racial law and India’s centuries-old caste system. It does not argue that slavery, the Holocaust and caste oppression are identical historical events. Their origins, mechanisms, victims, scales and consequences are different. What Wilkerson is looking for are recurring structural habits: inherited rank, restrictions on relationships, ideas of purity and contamination, occupations assigned by birth, the policing of boundaries, sanctioned humiliation and the constant reinforcement of who is permitted to stand where.
One of the most disturbing historical connections concerns Nazi Germany’s examination of American race law while constructing its own racial legislation. This is not simply a provocative invention of the film or Wilkerson’s book; legal historian James Q. Whitman documented sustained Nazi interest in American citizenship restrictions, anti-miscegenation statutes and other forms of racial law during the development of the Nuremberg Laws. Yale summarises that research in its discussion of Hitler’s American Model.
At the same time, the caste framework is not uncontested. Scholars and critics have debated how far caste and race can usefully be mapped onto one another, with some arguing that the comparison exposes recurring mechanisms of hierarchy and others warning that it can compress histories whose structures and development are substantially different. I think Origin is strongest when it leaves that tension visible. The interesting question is not whether every form of oppression can be placed in one convenient box. It is what societies repeatedly do when they need inequality to appear natural rather than constructed.
That is a far more uncomfortable question, and the film is better when it leaves some room around it rather than insisting that every connection has been neatly settled.
When an Argument Becomes a Swimming Pool
The film’s ideas land hardest when DuVernay stops explaining them and simply lets us watch what the structure does to somebody. The sequence involving Al Bright, the Black child who is allowed to attend a celebration at a segregated swimming pool only under humiliating restrictions, is devastating precisely because the cruelty is bureaucratically absurd. A child is surrounded by water and other children and yet adults have constructed an elaborate social ritual to make sure everybody understands that his body occupies a different category.
The same is true of the film’s treatment of manual scavenging in India. The production worked with people connected through advocacy organisations rather than treating the sequence as exotic misery imported for dramatic effect, while sanitary simulated latrines were constructed rather than requiring anyone to work with actual waste. It is a small production detail, but an important one in a film concerned with who society expects to perform degrading labour.
Then there is Bebelplatz in Berlin. The production recreated the Nazi book burning at the actual site, using roughly a thousand German background performers and five cameras during a single night of filming. It is one of the film’s largest images, but DuVernay does not treat it as historical spectacle for its own sake. The burning of books becomes another way hierarchy preserves itself: not merely through controlling bodies but through controlling memory, language and the limits of permissible knowledge.
The quieter scenes do something similar. Isabel’s encounter with Dave, the plumber played by Nick Offerman, initially seems designed to place two politically and culturally distant Americans in a basement together and wait for sparks. Instead, the scene turns on listening. The film does not ask Isabel to forget what symbols and political affiliations signify, nor does it pretend disagreement has vanished. It allows another possibility into the room: that categories tell us something about a person without telling us everything. That is considerably more interesting than another scene in which two characters represent opposing internet comments sections.
Allison and Elizabeth Davis, Watching from Inside the System
One of Origin’s most fascinating historical detours concerns anthropologists Allison Davis and Elizabeth Stubbs Davis, portrayed by Isha Blaaker and Jasmine Cephas Jones. Alongside Burleigh and Mary Gardner, they conducted the fieldwork that eventually became Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class, first published in 1941. The work examined race and class in the American South using caste as an analytical framework decades before Wilkerson returned to the idea.
Their story also exposes something the film repeatedly understands: studying a hierarchy does not exempt you from living inside it. The Black researchers cannot simply adopt the same social positions as their white colleagues because the society they are documenting is already assigning roles to them. Research itself becomes performance.
This is one reason Origin keeps slipping between Wilkerson’s present and historical reconstruction. At first the structure can feel almost like channel surfing through human misery, but gradually a pattern emerges. We are watching people attempt to see systems that have been deliberately made to look like ordinary life.
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor Holds an Impossible Film Together
Ellis-Taylor is effectively the gravitational field of Origin. DuVernay has said the film became possible once she stopped thinking of Caste merely as a book of sociology, philosophy and history and began seeing the latent story of Isabel inside it. That puts an unusual burden on the actor because Isabel must provide continuity between material separated by decades, continents and entirely different modes of storytelling.
Ellis-Taylor rarely reaches for a conventional inspirational-note performance. Even as Isabel’s thesis becomes clearer, she remains tired, uncertain and sometimes overwhelmed. There is no magical point where grief becomes productive and therefore worthwhile. She simply learns to keep working while carrying it.
The production notes also reveal that this was Ellis-Taylor’s first time at the top of a film’s call sheet, which is mildly astonishing given the length and quality of her career. DuVernay’s independent production model allowed the filmmakers to cast according to the roles rather than build the ensemble around conventional studio ideas of commercial hierarchy. It is difficult to imagine Origin without her. The film has plenty of intellectual machinery. Ellis-Taylor provides the bloodstream.
Jon Bernthal and the Ordinary Shape of Love
Bernthal has less screen time, but Brett’s presence continues long after he disappears from the narrative. That is partly because DuVernay does not introduce Isabel’s marriage merely so tragedy can happen to it. We spend enough time in its ordinary rhythms to understand what Isabel has lost.
Their chemistry has a slightly scruffy naturalness to it. They tease each other. They disagree. Brett looks after Ruby. Nothing about the relationship is presented as a grand thesis on interracial marriage even though, within the broader history the film examines, their ability to marry freely is itself historically significant. I found that restraint particularly effective. In a film constantly connecting private lives to enormous social systems, Brett and Isabel demonstrate that history eventually arrives at somebody’s kitchen table. Laws about who may marry whom, swim beside whom, live beside whom or touch whom can sound abstract in textbooks. Then two people fall in love and suddenly the abstraction has a face.
Bernthal is very good at that sort of physical tenderness, perhaps because his usual screen intensity never entirely disappears. It simply changes direction.
An Intimate Epic Shot on 16mm
The scale of the production is rather mad considering how independently it was made. After the project moved away from its original studio arrangement, DuVernay and producer Paul Garnes financed it independently and shot across the United States, Germany and India. Principal photography was accomplished in only 37 shooting days, with Savannah providing much of the production base and comparatively brief location work in Berlin and Delhi. The first rough assembly reportedly ran around four and a half hours.
Cinematographer Matthew J. Lloyd and DuVernay shot Origin on Super 16mm film, using Kodak Vision3 stocks and an ARRIFLEX 416. Rather than assigning each country and historical period a completely different visual language, the filmmakers used the common texture of film grain to bind the disparate strands together. Their visual references included Gordon Parks, Roy DeCarava, Schindler’s List, Carol and JFK, as detailed in Kodak’s production feature.
I think that decision matters more than it initially appears. There is plenty of period recreation in Origin, but very little of the polished nostalgia that often infects historical dramas. The image has texture without turning suffering into an exquisitely art-directed antique. As someone who notices design almost automatically, I liked that the production does not scream every change in era through colour grading and typography. Costume and production design have to carry an enormous amount of temporal information, but the visual world remains coherent. The past is not placed under glass. It keeps intruding on the present.
Kris Bowers Finds a Musical Language Between Worlds
Kris Bowers faced essentially the same problem with the score. How do you create musical continuity between the American South, Nazi Germany, contemporary America and India without reducing any of them to sonic shorthand? His research ranged from music created in concentration camps to Dalit musical traditions, Southern musical heritage and the work of a Jewish composer who fled Nazi Germany and eventually reached India. Bowers and DuVernay also allowed several extended passages to be driven largely by music and imagery rather than dialogue.
The result does not call attention to itself in the usual prestige-film manner. It works more like connective tissue, allowing the film to move between time periods without every transition feeling like the opening of another chapter in a textbook. Given how much talking Origin contains, those stretches of musical storytelling are particularly welcome.
Where Origin Strains Under Its Own Ambition
There are moments when I could feel the film trying very hard to make sure I understood it. Some conversations function less like conversations than seminars in which somebody has been assigned the task of raising the objection necessary for the next part of Isabel’s argument. Characters including Kate and Sabine occasionally feel as though they are there to give the thesis something to push against. With this much conceptual territory to cover, subtlety sometimes has to move aside so everybody can get onto the same train.
The film also has the inherent problem of comparative history. Even if Wilkerson’s intention is structural comparison rather than historical equivalence, cinema compresses ideas. Put an image of one atrocity beside another and viewers will naturally read an equation into the cut. The criticisms of the caste framework are therefore worth taking seriously rather than treating them as evidence that somebody simply has not understood the argument.
For me, though, those weaknesses do not invalidate the project. They expose how difficult the project is. I would rather see an ambitious film occasionally overstate its case than a timid one pretend there is nothing to investigate.
The Ending Is Less a Revelation Than an Arrival
There is no conventional mystery to solve at the end of Origin. Isabel does not uncover a secret document that proves the entire thesis. The ending instead brings together the people, images and histories that have accumulated around her while she completes the book.
That distinction mattered to me. The film begins with an act of violence that has already happened and asks why societies keep producing categories within which such violence becomes imaginable. By the end, Isabel has not eliminated those categories. She has found language for describing the architecture beneath them.
DuVernay’s final passages become increasingly lyrical, allowing the historical threads to coexist rather than continuing to argue them point by point. We see love, separation, resistance, humiliation and memory as parts of the same larger human struggle over who is permitted to belong. And then there is Isabel herself, having survived enough personal loss that finishing a book feels less like professional achievement than evidence that some part of her is still moving.
I liked that the film does not pretend understanding a system is the same thing as defeating it.
The Book, Trump and a Date I Had Wrong
I had initially remembered Caste becoming a bestseller shortly before Donald Trump first became president, but the chronology is different. Wilkerson’s book was published on 4 August 2020, during Trump’s first term, and became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller that year. Trump’s first presidential term ran from 2017 to 2021. The book’s publication details are available from Penguin Random House.
The actual timing is still culturally significant without having to force a neat before-and-after story onto it. Caste appeared during a year in which American public debate was intensely focused on race, policing, history and national identity. That context follows the film, but Origin is broader than any individual administration or election. Politicians change. The film is interested in the older structures that remain available for societies to inherit, adapt or revive.
Sometimes the Random Choices Follow You Home
I did not expect Origin to be this emotionally heavy, and I certainly did not expect a film built around a work of social history to affect me most through a marriage. Perhaps that is exactly why DuVernay chose this form. Statistics establish scale, laws reveal intent and scholarship provides language, but people make history comprehensible. Brett carrying Ruby. Isabel sitting alone after another loss. A child standing in a swimming pool while adults enforce a rule too cruel and ridiculous to deserve the word civilisation. Researchers changing their behaviour because the society they are studying will not permit them simply to observe it. A crowd raising its arms while one man refuses.
None of those images proves a universal theory of human hierarchy. Together, they make the theory difficult to dismiss as something that belongs only in books.
I went into Origin completely blind because I needed something to watch on holiday. I came out thinking about the strange persistence of systems human beings build to rank one another, and about the equally persistent people who keep finding ways to describe, resist and survive them. Not exactly holiday fluff. I am glad I did not know that beforehand.
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